New York, NY – Dec. 17, 2015 – Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN) announced today a strategic alliance with BARTRENDr, a data analytics and social network company focused on the beverage alcohol industry. As a leader in the beverage alcohol category, with the most comprehensive measurement and analytic capabilities, Nielsen continues to build its service roster with the launch of Nielsen Bar Moments. Together with BARTRENDr, Nielsen will expand its analytical arsenal with real time mobile insights, helping clients better understand consumer behavior, preferences and choices through analysis of real conversations among beverage alcohol consumers, at bars and social gatherings of all types across the country.

Nielsen Bar Moments will be powered by BARTRENDr’s rich data set from its active online community, capturing over 1.5 million monthly engagements from recurring users. This opt-in community consists of adults who are digitally savvy social media users, and who regularly connect, chat and share details of their night out with others. Through BARTRENDr, real time and trending topics from around the bar and social scene are captured anywhere in the country, whether that scene is at home, on a couch with friends or at a physical bar establishment, outside of the home. For marketers in the beverage alcohol space, Nielsen Bar Moments will help to uncover on and off premise insights from real people having real conversations about beverage products and other topics of interest to those at the bar. Additionally, Nielsen will have the ability to evaluate drinking related discourse and validate the impact of marketing/merchandising programs on consumers.

Unique to Nielsen Bar Moments, this enhanced measurement offering will also enable marketers to actually spark and capture chatter around drinking occasions among consumers, capturing real time sentiments during social events. Key demographics such as Millennials and Multicultural consumers are both strongly represented and heavily engaged in BARTRENDR’s data set. This means having access to demographic groups more receptive to this type of digital platform versus traditional research techniques. The data captured through Nielsen Bar Moments can not only be analyzed among different consumer segments, it can also be analyzed by a variety of geographic and bar types – ranging from a national view to a more narrowly defined local view.

“There are very few things more inherently ‘social’ than what happens at drinking occasions around a bar, whether that ‘bar’ is physically down the street or virtually in the comfort of a consumer’s home,” said Danny Brager, SVP of Nielsen’s Beverage Alcohol practice. “Word of mouth can have an incredibly powerful impact on consumer behavior, and BARTRENDr is uniquely positioned to capture what is being said, when it is said. Nielsen now leads the industry with the most comprehensive beverage/alcohol offering across measurement and analytics. We are now able to provide our clients with real-time data and diagnose discussions at a very granular level. This perfectly complements the range of services we’ll be able to offer our beverage alcohol clients – we’ll be able to offer both a measurement of what consumers BUY, and what they SAY – inclusive of the critically important on premise channel which has been historically difficult to measure.”

“When we first launched and entered the social media market, we instantly realized that we were sitting on valuable consumer data for major brands,” said BARTRENDr co-founder and CEO Devon Bergman. “Partnering with Nielsen gives us the ability to help drinks suppliers understand what consumers are really saying about their brands and products, in the moment, starting with the beverage alcohol industry.”

Nielsen Bar Moments will be available in the first quarter of 2016.

About Nielsen

Nielsen Holdings plc (NYSE: NLSN) is a global performance management company that provides a comprehensive understanding of what consumers watch and buy. Nielsen's Watch segment provides media and advertising clients with Total Audience measurement services for all devices on which content — video, audio and text — is consumed. The Buy segment offers consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers the industry's only global view of retail performance measurement. By integrating information from its Watch and Buy segments and other data sources, Nielsen also provides its clients with analytics that help improve performance. Nielsen, an S&P 500 company, has operations in over 100 countries, covering more than 90% of the world’s population. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com.

About BARTRENDr

BARTRENDr is a data analytic company focused on the alcohol industry. The company has social app called OpenBar, which is a private social network for people to connect to share drinks, start conversations and make friends in a virtual-bar setting. The company’s unique analytics platform is capable of social interactivity data processing that makes sense of millions of unique conversations, and makes intelligent recommendations.